Long story short: tell the Ohio legislature and a Florida texbook corporation to reject anti-education initiatives, tell the Biden Administration to keep the Silicon Valley Bank’s affordable housing promises, and tell our EPA to enact a more vigorous soot standard. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
You may have read my post from earlier today about Ohio’s “controversial beliefs” bill, which would be SB 83, the so-called Higher Education Enhancement Act; I said the details were even worse than the news hook (that the bill would ban the teaching of “controversial beliefs” in state-funded colleges), so here they are: it would ban mandatory diversity training, it would force professors to post all their syllabi online, and would ban any teaching that might cause “psychological distress.” You can reach the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino, at (614) 644-7718, and you can reach Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman at (614) 466-7584 and Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens at (614) 466-1366. You can tell them all you’re sick of the “hurt feelings” of bigots meaning more to them than the facts of history.
And now we’re on to Florida, again! The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell textbook publishing corporation Studies Weekly to stop erasing racism from its history texts. Apparently they’ve removed all references to race from its Rosa Parks lesson! That’d be like removing all references to Bernie Parent from a history of the Flyers’ mid-’70s Stanley Cup runs! Except not as evil, of course, for in Florida they act like they’ll hurt young white kids’ feelings by teaching them that Rosa Parks fought institutional racism, by white people, against Black people. Of course, kids ain’t really that fragile; grown-ups are. And fragile grown-ups shouldn’t get all the say about everything.
Daily Kos helps you tell our government to keep the affordable housing-related promises the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank made – specifically, by making honoring those commitments a condition of any SVB-related sale. One does get tired of always hearing that investors need to be “made whole” – and the Fed sure has bent over backwards to ensure that those investors were made whole! Nobody ever says the workers need to be made whole, and banks shouldn’t get off the hook for the promises they’ve made to communities, either. If the Biden Administration wants to prove that government works for Americans, keeping SVB’s promise to invest in communities would be a good start.
Finally, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to improve its soot pollution standard. The science tells us that the 8 microgram-per-cubic-meter standard would be much better than our EPA’s proposed 10 micrograms standard – it would more than double the reduction in health care costs over the next decade, because fewer folks will get sick, soot pollution helping to cause, as it does, a lot of health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. The costs to industry represent around two percent of that number, and though big corporations will complain that they have to pay it, this is America, where everyone makes sacrifices for the common good. Right?
Comments